Last night on Q&A, panellists including Germaine Greer debated whether or not women should be held more accountable for their decision to stay in abusive relationships.
The questioner, a woman, asked:
“With all the opportunities that are afforded young women of today, why are they still making poor relationship choices and having children in abusive relationships? Should women be held more accountable for their choices? And should we be targeting anti-domestic violence campaigns more towards women than men?”
The question reflected an attitude commonly held among Australians: if men are violent, why don’t women just leave?
In the minds of many Australians, female victims of abuse are complicit, in various ways, in the violence perpetrated against them.
And it’s a view that’s, surprisingly, on the rise among young people. A report released by VicHealth in September, which surveyed 16-24 year olds across Australia, concluded that young people today are more likely to excuse and justify violence against women than their parents’ generation. A quarter of those surveyed were willing to excuse violence if the man regrets his behaviour, or if he becomes so angry he loses control. Some are willing to excuse violence if the victim is affected by alcohol.
The problem with victim-blaming
The view that we should hold women partially accountable for family violence may be entrenched, but it’s deeply problematic. It is a form of victim-blaming that the Royal Commission into Family Violence reports is one of the biggest obstacles to ending family violence.
Firstly, it shifts the dialogue from reforming men’s attitude and behaviour towards women onto what women should do to prevent violence. Secondly, it acts as a deterrent to women who speak out about the abuse they’re suffering, only to find judgment and criticism of their actions from peers and authorities.
Most critically, it reinforces the very messaging that abusers feed victims day in, day out: that the abuse is their fault. For many women, it can take years to realise that their partners’ abusive behaviour is unacceptable, because abusers justify their actions by accusing victims or provoking them. It is a key part of the abuse cycle, and it leads hundreds of thousands of women to believe that they deserve to live with violence, and that they can avoid this violence by changing their own behaviour.
If we reinforce the message that these women are at fault, for not leaving sooner, for endangering their children, we are entrenching the disempowering of a group of people whose self-esteem has been systematically eroded, sometimes over decades.
What’s more, asking women to stop “making poor choices” assumes an autonomy that many victims don’t have. The fact is that our society prevents women from leaving abusive relationships, even if they want to. Thousands of phone-calls to domestic violence emergency hotlines go unanswered, every second woman is turned away from over-crowded refuges (many of them ending up homeless), and we’re failing to address the economic gender inequality that sees so many women financially dependent on their (abusive) partners.
Why do we blame the victim? There are several reasons.
In some cases, it reflects sexist attitudes towards women, informing an automatic assumption that the victim must be to blame for ‘triggering’ their partners’ anger (because women are bad/disobedient/conniving/disloyal).
In a similar fashion, the frequent assumption that abused women are “making it up” or exaggerating reflects a cultural history of regarding women as less trustworthy witnesses.
But it’s not always sexism at play: it’s also a kind of cognitive dissonance. As The Monthly put it, “We reach for these excuses because the alternative – that hundreds of thousands of Australian men have chosen to inflict diabolical cruelty on their partners – is almost inconceivable.”
Dr Nina Burrows, a psychologist specialising in sexual abuse, created this excellent cartoon to explain the psychology of victim-blaming. “Everyone is afraid of rape and sexual abuse. If a victim’s experience makes other people feel afraid or out of control, they may turn their fears onto the victim.” This refocussing allows us to feel like we can avoid a similar fate, because we would do things differently.
The history behind it
It doesn’t help that victim-blaming has been enshrined in cultural approaches to violence against women for millennia. This great history lesson over at Everyday Feminism recalls the jaw-dropping ways that female victims of violence have been punished for their “crime” over the years.
If you were raped as a married woman in ancient Mesopotamia, as just one example, you were considered an adulteresss and shared punishment with your attacker – being bound and thrown in the river. What’s more horrifying is that this isn’t very different to what’s happening around the world today, some 4000 years later. Still, in rural communities from Africa to India, thousands of rape victims are punished, often brutally, by members of their communities for the ‘sin’ of being sexually assaulted.
In 12th century England, a rape survivor was obliged to go at once to the neighbouring townships and show men of “good repute” her bleeding and torn garments. If she didn’t run through the streets screaming, she was at fault.
Though less extreme, the parallel to family violence in 2016 is still clear. Abused women are still expected to escape, to follow a socially sanctioned script of what an abused woman “should do”, that bears very little reality to what women actually can and will do, when subjected to violence.
An alternative: ‘Empower’ not ”Hold Accountable’
Returning to Q&A, Liberal MP Sharman Stone offered an alternative to the questioner’s assertion that we should hold abused women “accountable” – a suggestion that was partially echoed by some of the panellists.
Rather, Stone argued we must “empower” women to leave abusive relationships: “We need to… make sure our women become financially independent and educated and given a decent career, so they can walk away and not be financially dependent on a man who’s abusive of them.” Importantly, she qualified, “But [let’s] never blame the victim because she hasn’t walked away.”
Stone’s discussion of empowerment was a subtle but important reframing of the discussion, moving the language away from the punitive “holding women accountable” for their “poor choices” and their “consequences”.
Yes, as the questioner suggests, we need to better equip women to leave abusive relationships, to recognise early warning signs and minimise the risk to their families. But this doesn’t come by sharing the blame between victim and perpetrator. It comes by supporting women to regain autonomy over their lives.